Coming Home

A strange thought occurred to me as I was watching my newly downloaded malware program search for harmful programs to corner and devour. When I go home (yes, as childish as it is, I still consider my parents’ house home) I won’t get to sleep in my bed. My bed, which I have had since soon after I moved into our basement the summer before 8^th grade, is currently with me in Seattle. And I would wish on no one the pain of attempting to move it back out of this room until August when my internship ends and I move out. Meaning when I go home for Thanksgiving and again briefly at Christmas, I will be sleeping in what has been, but now even more so is, the “guest room”.

The stipulations I received in gaining a room of my own were two fold. 1) I had to move (as opposed to kicking my younger sister out of the room we had shared since she was old enough to sleep through the night) and 2) I had to move to the downstairs bedroom that would then double as my room and the guest room since that’s what it was before I moved.  I accepted these conditions (not because I don’t love my sister, but when you’re going into 8^th and she’s only in 5^th, you need your own space) and moved down to the basement with only my stuffed animals and my middle school alarm clock to keep me company in a vastly different world than the one I was used to.

Since the move I have been successfully kicked out of it (mostly quietly begrudgingly (yay adverbs!)) every time a grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, or set thereof came to stay at our house. After a while some of the older relatives had a hard time doing stairs as often as they would need to to stay in our basement, and so they would take my brother’s room which is on the main floor. That meant moving the bed I had been using upstairs to his room, and the purchase of the sweet Asian themed futon (the couch kind rather than the actually Asian kind)that currently resides far from the home I love. <--song lyrics from my voice lessons.

I don’t know why it suddenly occurred to me that if my family has even moved what was once my brother’s college futon (and is now superfluous basement/entertainment room furniture) into my old room yet, I will be staying on a fairly unknown piece of furniture. It doesn’t bother me (I have slept on many the unknown piece of furniture, at least I’ve been previously introduced to this one) so much as makes me realize that my life in Kennewick is, to some small degree, over. Not necessarily completely, and not necessarily for the rest of my life. But the Kennewick bit of my life involving school is done. Just as my life in general involving school is done. I’m a working adult now, at least in some sense of the word. And even though I know that my parents will always have a place for me should I need it, I have moved out. I have taken the space that I sleep, work, read, write, Sudoku, and even occasionally eat (yes I know, I shouldn’t have food in my room it’ll attract things) and moved it to a new place, both in the physical realm and in my proverbial life.

It’s a weird place for me, especially because the place I’m at is no more stable than the place I’ve been the last three years. Like college, this internship will end, and I will take my bed and move on to the next exciting chapter in my life, leaving behind friends and memories that I will try my best to keep in contact with over the years. And me and my bed will find a new place to nest, and we’ll be there for a while, and we might stay, or we might move, but it’s hard to say if it will feel as much like home as home did. At least we’ll have the alarm clock to keep us company.